Method Man/Ghostface Killah/Raekwon: Wu-Massacre

Notable album covers catch the eye, dribble it around a little, and then snap it back into place, forever skewed. They can be funny, gross, shocking, stunning, or just plain wrong. They can define artists. With Take Cover, we aim to track down the most striking new album covers taking up web space and vinyl bins and get the story behind them.

In this installment, we check in with comic book artist Chris Bachalo (Sandman, Uncanny X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man) and Def Jam designer Alex Haldi. Bachalo and Haldi are the two men responsible for the comic book-style artwork for the Method Man/GhostfaceKillah/Raekwon collaborative album Wu-Massacre. The album cover is comprised of pieces of three variant covers, one for each rapper.Â Bachalo and Haldi imagined the three Wu-Tang Clan members as hyper-violent comic book anti-heroes, each with his own backstory and superpowers. We dork out with Bachalo and Haldi below.

Method Man variant cover:

Pitchfork: How did the two of you get involved in this album cover?

Chris Bachalo: You want the truth? Alex took my dog, and sent me an email: "Chris, I have your dog, and you have to do these Wu-Tang covers or you'll never see the dog again." What else was I going to do? He said, "You have six days to do the covers." And what'd it take, Alex? Was it 60 days later?

Alex Haldi: Luckily, the timeline pushed back. It was a resilient dog. [laughs]

CB: No, Alex sent me an email one day and asked me if I would be interested in doing the covers. He said I had six days. And so I thought about it for a few minutes because it is the Wu-Tang Clan; that's pretty serious. And he said, "Here's some money," and I said, "OK." We ran with it, and thank goodness we were able to have extra time to take care of the covers and do a proper job on them. I'm not sure what Alex would've received from me after six days. That's a lot of work.

AH: Yeah, it ended up working out really well. It's one of those projects that's typical in the music industry; they act like we need everything that week, and then the album comes out half a year later. We definitely wanted to go the comic book route, and I've always been a comic book fan. Chris is one of my favorite illustrators from when I was coming up, so I reached out to him. He was a little hard to track down, but I got a hold of him and luckily he accepted. It was really nice to get Chris on board. My whole thing was if we're going to do it, I wanted to do it right, like a real comic book. I didn't want to do it half-assed and just get an illustrator to do it comic book-style. I wanted to get someone who was known in the industry and really make it an event. And we lucked out. Everyone's loving them.

CB: I'm glad Alex has good taste.

Pitchfork: Whose decision was it to do the cover comic book-style?

AH: They originally just came to me and said they wanted portraits. Simply for the fact that it's hard to get the three of them in the same place at the same time, we were going to go the illustration route in general instead of doing a photoshoot. All of the Wu-Tang personas are based on comic books, and I know that Method Man is a huge comic book fan, so I just thought it made perfect sense. Chris has created some pretty sweet characters, and a lot of the guys who create characters are few and far between, so I knew that he could come with some original characters.

Pitchfork: Can you describe the way you turned the rappers into characters? Did you come up with powers and backstories for them?

CB: Yeah. The first thing Alex shared with me was a huge, huge bunch of information for the guys, including how they dress and names for the characters. He sent me a bunch of photographs, and he gave me a really good profile of each one of the characters and what they should look like. That helped a lot because it gave me a lot of information within which to conceptualize the characters.Â I sat down with it for a couple weeks and thought about it, and the first thing I did was start putting together ideas as to what I thought the guys would like. If I were these guys, what would I like to see?

AH: Yeah, it's pretty incredible. We just did these cards, and it's pretty remarkable how tight they are to my original ideas. I'm a huge Wu-Tang guy. Raekwon's the Chef, and he's also into the mafia stuff, so it kind of made sense to make him a "Dexter"-style mafia assassin.

CB: As an illustrator, it's fantastic to get that kind of information. It really helps in putting together a clear picture of what the characters are going to look like. So coming up with the images was, all in all, pretty easy and it was fun. And I think the results were really good.

AH: Mostly, we can thank the guys because they're all such characters, so that really helps to get something out of them.

Pitchfork: With Meth, you've got him shooting some kind of energy blast out of his hand.

AH: Method Man's moniker is Johnny Blaze, and his thing is smoking, so I figured it just made sense to make him a Human Torch/Ghost Rider kind of character with fire, and have him with a blunt in his mouth.

Ghostface variant cover:

Pitchfork: It was cool to see Ghostface in a mask again. It's been a long time.

CB: The mask was such a great object to work with as a base to create the rest of the character. We went back and forth with different versions of his character, with the mask and without the mask. I love the mask, and everything I was drawing had the mask on it. Alex would come back to me and ask if he could have a couple of versions without the mask. So I just kept drawing them the mask version, and apparently they liked it and decided to go with that.

AH: When you're the liaison for the label, you always have to worry about if egos are going to come into play, so I wanted to have options where you could see his face, in case they freaked out. And it's cool. I had heard that Ghost, back in the day, was a brawler-type dude anyway, so it just made sense to make him huge.

CB: He's a bigger-than-life mountain-of-a-man character, so I was drawing him as big and burly as possible. Almost like a... not a Hulk character, but slightly less than that.

Pitchfork: A Sasquatch type of character?

CB: Yeah, without the hair. [laughs]

AH: My main reference was Colossus.

CB: Like aÂ Shaq O'Neal or somebody like that, with a big mask and robes and chains.

AH: He had just come out with that R&B album, so it made sense to have him with chained-up women and kind of go there. We definitely wanted to go over-the-top with that.

CB: The more chains, the better. And all the money and the gold-- it was just great. Super props to work with.

Raekwon variant cover:

Pitchfork: What about Rae? Was there a comic book character that you used as the basis for his character?

AH: Rae was a little tougher. Even in the Wu-Tang book, they talk about how he's the Chef because he was a little thicker than the rest of the guys. So it's hard to find a character that wasn't insultingly pudgy but was also badass. I thought Beast because I'm a huge X-Men guy.

CB: You sent me a really neat picture of the Kingpin from Daredevil. Obviously, I toned him down a little bit, as far as the scale is concerned, but that was a great image for inspiration. Also, we're both big fans of the "Dexter" TV series. He wears a butcher's apron, and I was like, "How do I make a butcher's apron look cool?" Alex sent me a shot from "Dexter" when he's in one of his killing rooms and he's got a big apron on, and we ran with that.

AH: Yeah, he had the biggest risk of seeming cheesy, and I think he ended up being the most badass of all of them.

CB: Because Wu-Tang Clan has that samurai feel to their background, I really wanted to exaggerate the butcher knives and make them like they're still butcher knives, but they're like great big samurai swords. They're great tools that he uses for his business.

Pitchfork: Chris, would you be interested in doing more album covers?CB: Sure. As soon as Alex released the first images from the covers, I received a half a dozen requests from guys all around the world asking me to do hip-hop album covers for them. [laughs] I got a big kick out of them. A lot of it has to do with subject matter. The three guys I got to work with are such characters, and there are so many ideas you can latch onto. The Wu-Tang culture was fun to work with. It was a huge, huge attraction for me to work on these specific covers for these guys. And you have no idea how thrilled I am that this is going to happen and that the album covers are going to get published. It's great fun for me. A thrill.